The Mouth That Roared (13 page)

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To do my job, I leaned heavily on our veteran scouts, Ruben Amaro Sr., Hugh Alexander, Tony Lucadello, Eddie Bachman, Wes Livengood, and Brandy Davis. I asked them to strongly consider every prospect’s “head and heart,” the qualities I believed separated good players from great ones. With the help of these scouts, I overhauled our entire scouting manual after the 1972 season. We developed a detailed grading system for prospects based on how much money a scout would be willing to pay to sign the player. We also updated our crosschecking system by which we compared players from different areas of the country. Pope brought our scouts into the draft era, and it was my job to hone our procedures for identifying the best talent in the country. I demanded that all my scouts do their jobs with the utmost thoroughness. For example, if one of them went to a high school or college game to look at a player, I required he submit a report on the entire roster.

I became close with Hughie, who had been working to identify baseball talent since the age of 20. His scouting career started in 1937 when he lost his left hand in an oil drilling accident in Oklahoma. That put an end to a promising playing career with the Indians. But Cleveland added him to its scouting department and had him shadow Cy Slapnicka, one of the team’s existing scouts. Not long thereafter, Hughie went out on his own and found Cleveland a couple of future All-Stars. Years later, he moved over to the Dodgers, who, thanks to Hughie, signed players including Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes, and Don Sutton, among others. We pried Hughie away from the Dodgers in 1971, and it turned out to be one of the best moves we ever made. Nobody worked longer hours scouring the amateur ranks and other major league teams’ rosters for talent. And nobody had a better eye for talent. He knew almost every minor league general manager in the country and often returned from his road trips with valuable pieces of inside information about available players.

But Uncle Hughie, as everyone called him, was more than just a scout. He also served as one of Pope’s most trusted advisers. Pope rarely made a trade or brought up a guy from the minor leagues without first consulting Hughie. They’d sit in a room together, discussing personnel decisions and chain-smoking cigarettes until the air was blue.

As I told the
Philadelphia Inquirer
at the time of Hughie’s death in 2000, “He ranks right there with the best people in the history of the franchise. He did as much as anybody to help the Phillies organization get where it was in the ’70s and ’80s.”

Hughie quickly learned to cope with losing his hand, and with it, his dream of becoming a major leaguer. In the weeks following the accident, he stayed at home and pouted. Finally, his dad, who was an oil man, ordered him to get his ass out of the house. He let Hughie drive one of his old cars to a bar in Seminole, where Hughie had a few drinks. On his way home, he got a flat tire. Hughie stewed with anger. “How the hell am I supposed to change a goddamn tire with one hand?” he muttered to himself. But he figured it out, using his legs to help do the job.

That was Hughie—a man full of energy, ingenuity, and smarts.

Hughie never let his disability get in his way. When Sylvia invited him to our house for dinner soon after he arrived in Philadelphia, she served steak and corn on the cob. Much to the amazement of our wide-eyed children, Hughie managed to manipulate his knife and fork with only one hand. He became a regular guest at our home and shared wonderful stories of his baseball-related travels through America. He also taught our younger son, Doug, how to cheat at cards. It took me a while to figure out why Doug kept beating me, hand after hand. I should have known Uncle Hughie had something to do with it.

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Some of the guys I worked with in Philadelphia had been friends and confidants since my early days in professional baseball. One of them was Ruben Amaro Sr.

As I look back over the course of the past five decades, I couldn’t have asked for a better friend, ally, and like-minded baseball man than Ruben, who was an instrumental part of helping Pope and me revitalize the Phillies in the 1970s.

My first contact with Ruben came in 1958 when I was trying to throw strikes by him. He played shortstop for the Cardinals’ top minor league affiliate in Rochester, and I was in my first full year of Triple-A ball, with Miami. During the off-season, the Cardinals traded Ruben to the Phillies. We became teammates in Buffalo.

In the early weeks of our friendship, our longest conversations took place when the infielders would gather around the mound during a game. Ruben liked to talk to the pitchers on his team, especially when they were in a jam. He would later tell me he was hesitant to engage me in these discussions at first. “You were a big, gigantic man with a big voice,” he told me. “I was small and very quiet. I didn’t know if you’d want me to mind my own business.”

Once Ruben and I got to know each other, he realized I appreciated ballplayers who were thinkers and observers.

Off the field in Buffalo, Sylvia and I became close friends with Ruben. We supported him as he confronted racist landlords who didn’t want to rent an apartment to a dark-complexioned Mexican, especially not one who was dating a lily-white girl from Philadelphia.

Our bond only increased in 1960 when he and I both got called up to the Phillies for the first time. Over the next few seasons, we went through the Gene Mauch/John Quinn wringer that turned a young and struggling ballclub into a winner. Then we both endured the highs and lows of the 1964 season in Philadelphia.

Ruben was traded to the Yankees after the 1965 season and finished out his career with the Angels in 1969, the year I finished my second season of managing minor league ball for the Phillies. Back in Philadelphia, I met with Pope to discuss organizational matters. It was then that I learned Ruben had accepted a managerial job with the Diablos Rojos del Mexico, the Reds of Mexico, and was on his way there. His family was a big deal in Mexico. Ruben’s father, Santos, a native of Cuba, is enshrined in the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame.

“Pope, we can’t let him go,” I said. “We could use a guy like that in our organization.”

I didn’t need to do much convincing. Pope liked the idea of hiring Ruben to manage our Triple-A team in Eugene, Oregon.

We somehow found out Ruben had stopped in Harrisburg to get an issue with his driver’s license straightened out. Pope made a few calls, and suddenly there was an all-points bulletin out for a car with a trailer hitched to it and a Hispanic at the wheel.

Ruben was somewhere on the Pennsylvania Turnpike when he saw the flashing lights of a state trooper’s cruiser. Ruben would later say he was cursing himself under his breath for getting a speeding ticket so early into his trek to Mexico. He rolled down his window to deal with the situation.

“Mr. Amaro?” the state trooper asked.

“Yes,” Ruben replied, more than a little surprised at the personal greeting.

“Paul Owens of the Philadelphia Phillies asked that you give him a call right away.”

Ruben pulled over and found a phone. Instead of driving to Mexico City, he headed for Eugene, where he served the organization as a player-coach in 1970.

Ruben went back to Mexico to manage in the winter and took some of our top prospects down there with him for some additional seasoning. He led that team to a championship. During a parade to celebrate the title, a horse stamped on his foot, completely shattering it. No longer able to play the game, he devoted himself to coaching and scouting full-time.

Thanks to Ruben, we later signed future All-Stars Julio Franco, Juan Samuel, and George Bell to professional contracts. Unfortunately, we lost Bell to the Blue Jays in the 1980 Rule 5 draft after Pat Gillick’s scouts saw him playing winter ball in the Dominican Republic.

Baseball is all about calculated risk. Not all our signings in Latin America or elsewhere bore fruit. In 1974, we gave a two-year, $30,000 contract to a 14-year-old Puerto Rican kid we felt had star potential. The deal made Jorge Lebron the youngest player ever to sign with a major league team. I predicted he would be the next Cesar Cedeno, a talented outfielder for the Astros in the 1970s. Instead, Lebron never panned out. He played parts of three seasons in our minor league system before appearing in his last professional game at the age of 16. Between the time we signed him and cut him, he fell severely out of shape—fat as a pig, in fact. He and Franco provide an interesting juxtaposition. Both “can’t-miss” prospects, one played professionally until he was 16, the other until he was 49.

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I got another chance to visit Cuba in the mid-1970s, when Delaware governor Pierre “Pete” DuPont arranged for a delegation from the state to travel to Havana. His wife, Elise, a State Department representative, led the group. My role was window dressing. Everyone knew Cuban president Fidel Castro loved baseball, so it seemed appropriate to bring a former ballplayer along. Mrs. DuPont’s main goal on the trip was to convince Castro to allow two Cuban women to emigrate to the United States on humanitarian grounds. Unfortunately, Sylvia wasn’t invited, depriving her yet again of a chance to visit Cuba.

I never met Castro, but I got to take an eye-opening tour of the country, which included a stop at the ballpark I played in as a minor leaguer. Elise DuPont returned home having secured the freedom of the women.

I never planned on getting mixed up in international intrigue while running the Phillies farm system, but if it meant landing a star player, I was willing to give it a go.

Not long after my Cuba trip, I was visiting friends in Easton, Pennsylvania, when Ruben tracked me down by phone with urgent news.

“One of the best young Cuban players wants to defect,” he said. “His team’s playing in a tournament in Mexico City right now. He’ll sign a contract with us if we can get him to the United States.”

The Cuban team’s first-base coach, who was a friend of Ruben’s, had agreed to help the young infielder evade the team’s security detail long enough for us to grab him before the next day’s game, his team’s last in Mexico.

“What do you need me to do?” I asked Ruben.

“Make some calls and get the permission we need to make this happen,” he replied.

I phoned Phillies owner Ruly Carpenter, who put me in touch with the organization’s lawyers. I also called Elise DuPont for advice. Within a few hours, we had a green light from the State Department to proceed.

I called Ruben back to let him know he could signal his friend.

“Tell me when the thing is done,” I told Ruben.

All the necessary people had been contacted. Everything was in place. In less than 24 hours, we were likely to have a top Cuban player in our farm system.

There was only one glitch: it rained like hell in Mexico City the next day. The Cuban team sat together at the stadium waiting to see if it would get the game in. The security detail sat with them. There was no opportunity for Ruben’s friend to help the kid slip away.

The team flew back home with the kid in tow. Thanks to lousy weather, we lost our chance to defect a Cuban.

*

At spring training, I encouraged our minor league coaches to play basketball together at the end of a long work day. We put up a rim against a cement wall of our complex and waited until all the players had left before heading to the makeshift court. The competition got pretty intense. During one game, Mel Roberts, an outfield instructor who was several inches shorter than me, drove down the lane and attempted a layup. I blocked Mel’s shot, and in the process, I fouled him so hard that he went flying into the cement wall face first. “I ain’t driving anymore,” Mel said after picking himself up off the ground. “From now on, I’m an outside shooter.”

Though he was pushing 50, Granny Hamner, a roving instructor who played 16 seasons for the Phillies, was a constant menace. He tripped, shoved, and elbowed opponents in an attempt to create general havoc on the court. After a hard-fought game, we’d all go inside and polish off a case of beer and talk baseball.

As farm director, one of my favorite parts of the job was going around to our minor league sites to check out our kids. On those visits, I made it clear we expected them to take pride in their preparation and play and to respect what it meant to play for the Phillies organization.

I guess my reputation for demanding hard work spread quickly. Dickie Noles, who I took in the fourth round of the 1975 draft, later admitted he was “scared out of his pants” every time I showed up.

During his first year in the minors, Dickie showed up for practice one morning a little worse for wear after a night of drinking. I watched from the roof of the team’s training facility as the coaching staff put the team through sprints. For the first round, Dickie ran hard. On the second, he moved noticeably slower. On the third, he really dogged it. “Hey, Noles, move your ass!” I yelled from my perch. He looked around trying to identify the voice. Then his gaze shifted upward to the roof. Our eyes met. Dickie turned around, went back to the start line, and proceeded to outrun almost everyone in the group, hangover and all.

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After the long hours spent trying to improve our baseball team, our gang also squeezed in a little fun.

Okay, a lot of fun.

Our annual organization-wide Christmas parties, no wives allowed, typified the freewheeling good times that we had whenever we got together. We’d roll home every year from those parties at 3:00 or 4:00
AM
knowing our wives would question us about what happened at the party, where we went after the party, and how we got home.